Author & Professor (CCNY)

Publications

Articles

This essay argues that in emotionally and politically fraught terrains tragic literature may offer an embodied, affective critique of the existing political order that is more effective than theoretical-didactic critiques.

For centuries, readers and critics have interpreted Darcy’s aloof and fastidious manner as a product of social class or personal choice. But reading those passages today, with our heightened awareness of the spectrum of neurological difference, a different reading is possible.

The question of whether prior traumatic events increase post-traumatic distress or bring about habituation to living with trauma in the general population remains unresolved. We address this question by comparing and contrasting the psychological impact of a singular trauma – the World Trade Center attacks in the United States – with that of continual trauma- the scores of suicide bombings that took place in Israel during the second Intifada.

“Tehran Kids.” The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time (Columbia University Press, 2012)

An introduction to my book in progress, a memoir of my search after a group of Polish Jewish children who fled Nazi occupied Poland via Russia, Uzbekistan, and Iran, ultimately reaching British controlled Palestine.

Analysis of citizenship and sacrifice in Moshe Shamir’s canonical novel-turned-play He Walked Through the Fields (1947).

Arguing that the underlying aesthetic, emotional, and political sensibility of the play is “tragic” in the classical sense, the article demonstrates how this tragic sensibility served to both portray and mask the fundamental contradictions of citizenship in the immediate post-statehood era.

The article is an analysis of the relationship between eating and writing in Hayyim Nahman Bialik’s Bialik’s poetry. Using Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic theory of ambivalence towards maternal feeding, it argues that such ambivalence is the basis of the poet’s identification with the national project.

This essay centers on the Hebrew translation and the reception of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda among Hebrew readers of the late nineteenth century. It provides a historical account of the various translation stages and analyzes the character Deronda’s importance as model citizen among aspiring nationalists. It also investigates Eliot’s place, and the place of women in general, within the predominantly male nineteenth century Hebrew reading public.